that's hardly the point is it? It won't play Xbox games, and it won't play the PC ports as well as an Xbox would

I consider the not being restricted to Xbox games only as a feature, not a disadvantage. It may or may not have better optimizations, but the Xbox will definitely have inferior hardware. As far as not having Kinect, I consider it a joy. That thing looks creepy as all hell.

But Star Brood is wrong. You can't build an mITX system for $500 that's as powerful as either the Xbox One or PS4. You may be able to do so in a year from now though.

Yeah you need a Radeon 7850 and a Blu-Ray drive, so for sure it'll be more than $500. $650-700 maybe. I'm assuming that a Core i5 3470 will keep up - and probably beat - what I assume to be the same 8-core Jaguar variant that's in the PS4.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do.

Same CPU but DDR3 memory and a GPU closer to a Radeon 7770 (though still more compute power than that). With a 256-bit memory bus, the DDR3 even at 2133Mhz comes in with less bandwidth than the Radeon 7770, too. It's got 32MB of embedded DRAM which I'm sure will be used for a frame buffer to help get anti-aliasing without a incurring a big bandwidth penalty, similar to what the Xbox 360 did. I'll be interested to see the two systems side by side.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do.

According to the AnandTech article you linked, each core of the CPU is going to be within kicking distance of Intel's next Atom. As much as the individual cores seem like they will suck, at least the next-gen consoles will encourage developers to start distributing their physics engine computations a bit so that we see better multiple-core support.

Maybe $500 was an exaggeration for a conventional ITX build with a 7850, but consider how much more powerful a real desktop CPU would be inside that ITX build.

Microsoft has filed for a Kinect-related patent, and it’s a doozy of an application. The abstract describes a camera-based system that would monitor the number of viewers in a room and check to see if the number of occupants exceeded a certain threshold set by the content provider. If there are too many warm bodies present, the device owner would be prompted to purchase a license for a greater number of viewers.

No, really. It’s that blunt. From the abstract: “The users consuming the content on a display device are monitored so that if the number of user-views licensed is exceeded, remedial action may be taken.”

t’s refreshing to see Microsoft eschewing its play-nice-with-everyone approach to business for some old-fashioned, straight-up evil. The patent’s various claims can endow a device with a limited number of performances in a given period of time, a limited number of users allowed to view such performances, and the continuous monitoring of viewers during those performances. It also covers the determination of “when performance of the content to an identified user exceeds a threshold.”

The really interesting thing about this patent is that it suggests that copyright holders are allowed to govern performances in otherwise private dwellings. The application describes how the patent could be applied to head-mounted devices, large screens, gaming and media products, computers, and even mobile phones. Clearly, this isn’t just a method for cracking down on illicit big-screen viewings of movies and television that might plausibly be called a public performance.

Not that I don't think it's weird, but my lawyer friend (whose firm works on patents) would tell you having a patent means nothing.

Your lawyer friend is kind of a moron. Tell him to tell that to Samsung, who ended up having to pay a $2B penalty over "meaningless" patents.

It's true a patent is "meaningless" until it's held up in court, but that doesn't mean they're actually meaningless.

Besides, you're completely off-topic and you totally missed the point -- the point is, Microsoft filed the patent, which shows their intent or willingness to spy for the big copyright-holders. That right there is pretty evil.

If a patent is not used it's simply held to keep others from using it against you, especially if you decide to do something with it in the future.

Again tell that to the patent chasers like Ronald A. Katz who is nothing more than a Patent Troll whom has never produced anything tangible or sell-able but just that he "thought" up some Call center tech, patented it, and now chases after large corporations who employ similar systems.

But yeah I see this a chance for M$ to spy. I wonder if you have to keep Kinect plugged in in order to use the BluRay player?

(\_/) (O.o)(''')(''') Watch out for evil Terra-Tron; He Does not like you!

Again tell that to the patent chasers like Ronald A. Katz who is nothing more than a Patent Troll whom has never produced anything tangible or sell-able but just that he "thought" up some Call center tech, patented it, and now chases after large corporations who employ similar systems.

I was not implying that it was true in every case. Just that there are a lot of companies who hold patents to keep other people from trolling them.

Well, considering he works with patents all day, it's fair to say he does know what he's talking about.

I know an awful lot of people who work with things "all day" and don't actually know anything. IT support staff, anyone? Experience isn't anymore relevant than a piece of paper from a university (equally meaningless.)

tanker27 wrote:

But yeah I see this a chance for M$ to spy. I wonder if you have to keep Kinect plugged in in order to use the BluRay player?

As far as we have been able to discern, Kinect has to be plugged in for the machine to -boot-. That's all just rumors tho.

I wonder... Will MS be able to resell the data on how many people in the room were watching particular TV or social network service (or whatever other non-gaming crap will be running on it) Ad to the company who advertised their product in that Ad? Will the law enforcement agencies be able to legally request access to particular user's Kinect sensor from Microsoft in future using some unpublished Kinect API features? After all, new Xbox is supposed to be always connected to internet Oh, and can anyone recommend a book similar to "1984"?

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Cheer up, dude - not every post is meant to be a "srs bizness" for a "srs bizness" type of forum section. Some humor is always appropriate (unless it is clearly offensive based on religious, gender or racial quantities) regardless of the forum section or the discussed topic...

Speaking of humor - here's some more related to Xbox's identity issues:

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Now the PC software architecture – DirectX – has been kind of bent into shape to try to accommodate more and more of the batch calls in a sneaky kind of way. There are the multi-threaded display lists, which come up in DirectX 11 – that helps, but unsurprisingly it only gives you a factor of two at the very best, from what we've seen. And we also support instancing, which means that if you're going to draw a crate, you can actually draw ten crates just as fast as far as DirectX is concerned.

But it's still very hard to throw tremendous variety into a PC game. If you want each of your draw calls to be a bit different, then you can't get over about 2-3,000 draw calls typically - and certainly a maximum amount of 5,000. Games developers definitely have a need for that. Console games often use 10-20,000 draw calls per frame, and that's an easier way to let the artist's vision shine through.'

Until the PC can come to performance parity on the most basic things, it will never be the frontrunner again.